LIFE'S WORK AND GOD'S 
DISCIPLINE 



LIFE'S WORK AND GOD'S DISCIPLINE: 

THREE SERMONS 

^reacfietr before tfje ^ntbersitg of <£ambrtiige 

IN APEIL AND MAY, 1865. 



C. J. VATJGHAN, D.D. 

MASTER OF THE TEMPLE, 
AND CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN. 



PUBLISHED AT THE REQUEST OF THE VICE-CHANCELLOR. 

SECOND EDITION. 

Scmfcott : 
MACMILLAN AND CO. 

1873 
[All Rights reserved.] 



(*■* 



N* 



^ 

s 



-£ 



(Eambrtoge : 

PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY. M.A. 
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 

Exchange 
Western Out. Univ. Library 

APR 1 7 1940 



- 



CONTENTS. 



I. 

THE WORK BURNED AND THE WORK- 
MAN SAVED. 

II. 
THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 

III. 

THE REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE OF DISEASE 

AND DEATH. 



I. 



THE WORK BURNED, AND THE 
WORKMAN SAVED. 



v.s. 



TEE WORK BURNED AND THE WORK. 
MAN SAVED, 

i Cor, iii. 15. 
If any mans work shall be burned, he shall 
suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so 
as by fire. 

The work burned, and the person saved — thej 
life gone for nothing, and yet the soul rescued 
as through fire — this is a combination as start- 
ling as it is unique. The text, if this be its 
meaning, certainly stands alone in Holy Scrip- 
ture. 

In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall 
every word be established. Such is the rule of 
justice, when life hangs in the balance : and 



4 TEE WORK BURNED 

God Himself has been pleased commonly to 
adhere to it, when He speaks for the guidance 
of lives and the salvation of souls. 

A peculiar interest therefore attaches itself 

to those exceptional cases in which the whole 
weight of Divine authority rests upon a single, 
isolated, solitary utterance ; when we can turn 
to no parallel, but must accept as an inspired 
saying a testimony which comes to us unsup- 
ported and alone. 

Of this kind is St Paul's declaration con- 
cerning the remedial purpose (in certain cases) 
not only of bodily inflictions in this life, but 
even — which is a wholly different matter — of 
sicknesses unto death. Of this kind, his dis- 
closure of the change equivalent to Resurrection 
which shall pass (at Christ's Advent) upon the 
generation of the living. Of this kind — so far 
at least as the Now Testament is concerned — 
his distinct prediction of the final salvation of 
the national Israel. Of this kind, St Peter's 



AND THE WORKMAN SAVED. 5 

mysterious history of the preaching of the Lord 
Jesus Christ, quickened in the Spirit, to the 
(once disobedient) spirits in prison. Of this 
kind, that revelation, on which I desire to say 
a few practical words this day, of a possible 
conflagration of the life's work, accompanied by 
a salvation, as through fire, of the soul and 



person of the workman. 

The Church of Corinth, by a startling anti- 
cipation of the follies and sins of later genera- 
tions, had split itself up into religious parties. 
Taking as their watchwords the names of 
blessed Apostles and holy teachers by whom 
God had taught and wrought amongst them; 
taking in some cases the yet holier name of 
Christ Himself, as though to assert for one 
faction a still purer doctrine or a still more 
immediate inspiration; they had rent to pieces 
the seamless coat, and cut into minutest sec- 
tions the indivisible body. 

Such is the scene upon which this remark- 



6 THE WORK BURNED 

able Li nts itself. It musl have come 

into the Corinthian assembly almost with the 
surprise and shock of an apparition : bo won- 
derfully life-like is the Apostle's writing; so 
individual, bo human, so impassioned, so vocal. 
Carnal men, he says to them, carnal, not 
spiritual! with all your vaunted gifts, so infan- 
tine in graces! envying and striving, j ■ 
and jangling — setting up as heads of parties 
men luho all came to you from one Lord, and 
all laboured to bring you to one end — what 
shall I say to you? Shall I remind you. that 
man is nothing, that God is all ? Shall I rem ind 
you that the work of Christ is one work, and 
that no labourer in that work shall be the loser by 
another's gain? that, as ice are God's co-w 
so ye are God's husbandry and God's building? 
Bather let me remind you of tlie solemn respon- 
sibilities which lie upon the workmen, if so be I 
,i/(i y win you from this silly idolatry of the man 
[be he who Ac may) to feci for him and to pity 



AND THE WORKMAN SAVED. 7 

him, to help him tuith your sympathy and to 
help him with your prayers. Remember the 
anxiety of the work — forecast the revelations of 
the Day — and assuredly you will have no heart 
to tempt us, whether it be I or they, into a 
rivalry as senseless as it is wicked. 

The work of the ministry is a work of build- 
ing. There is a vast spiritual Temple rising 
upon earth, to be the everlasting habitation of 
God through the Spirit. The foundation-stone 
of that temple is laid once for all : it is Christ 
Himself No man, I suppose, luill think to 
disturb that — to displace Him. But the work 
is not done because the foundation is laid. 
The walls must gradually rise, tier above tier 
— each day and each age witnessing the pro- 
gress — till at last, in God's time, the headstone 
shall be brought forth with shoutings. Mean- 
while the various parts of the building are 
portioned out among the builders. Every 
Christian teacher has his place assigned him* 



8 THE WORK BURNED 

One little department of the work is Jtis alone: 
he is responsible for it. It is left to him 
to choose his materials, and to work them in. 
No man stands over him from day to day to 
revise or to overhaul Jtis labour. He 'may take, 
if he will, of the most valuable and the most 
beautiful; gold and silver and costly stones; 
marble, porphyry, jasper, crystal; lavishing 
upon his cherished toil every offering of devo- 
tion. He may take, if he will — no man for- 
bidding him — of the vilest and the least du- 
rable : he may even insert wood into the temple 
wall; he may take hay to fill a crevice here, 
and stubble to stop a hole there; ignorant 
and undiscerning as to the proper material, 
and giving to the responsible task an unskilful 
hand and an uninstructed eye. And yet his 
contribution, however valueless, may rest on 
the one foundation. His own trust may be in 
the Saviour, and Jtis own heart may be sub- 
stantially right with Cud. 



AND TEE WORKMAN SAVED. 9 

At length the clay comes; the clay of clays : 
revealed amidst fire, it shall try the work : to 
each separate part the scrutiny shall address 
itself: the gold and the silver, and the solid 
beautiful stone, will abide the tried: but what 
of the wood and the hay and the stubble? 
Where shall they he in that searching ordeal? 
Vain will it be then to make excuses: vain 
to excuse, too late to repair. The bad work- 
man must be content to suffer loss; to lose 
his wages: happy if he can escape, with life 
in his hand, through the scorching and searing 
and consuming flame. 

Even thus shall it be with Christ's minis- 
ters in the day when the Son of Mem is re- 
vealed. Judge ye whether they to whom an 
office so responsible and so perilous has been 
consigned — they before whom lies a future of 
judgment so critical and so fear fid — are fit 
persons to be made into watchwords of party 
or into idols of worship ; whether they do not 



10 Tin: WORK BURNED 

rather claim at your hands a reverent co 
sion, showing itself alike in thoughtful kelp 
and d vout prayer. 

Such is, I believe, the general aspect of 
tin' text and context It will be perceived that 
we have understood by the opposite kinds of 
material, not persons, but doctrine; though 
//U*7 *■ *v we forget not the more usual application of 

this figure of the building to the lives and souls 
of individual Christian men. Know ye not 
that ye are the temple of God? The temple 
of God is holy ; which temple ye are. To ivhom 
/ coming, as unto a lining stone... ye also, as living 
stones, are built up a spiritual house. Ye are 
built upon the foundation of the Apostles and 
Prophets.., for an habitation of God through 
the Spirit. But the similitudes of Scripture 
are plastic, not rigid. Nothing in the ( Jhurch's 
history has been more fertile in discord and 
error than the tendency of theologians to stereo- 
type metaphor. Sometimes within the conr 






AND THE WORKMAN SAVED. ll 

fines of one passage a various turn is given to 
the same figure. And in the instance before 
us it ought not, I think, to have been disputed 
that that building which in the 16th verse 
is a temple of men is in the 12th verse a 
structure of doctrine. In no other sense can 
I understand the marvellous conjunction before 
us ; the work burned, and the workman saved. 
Let me hasten to the application. 

And first let us take the exact case con- 
templated by St Paul himself. 

A man has devoted himself to the Church's 
ministry. 

It is the case, present or future, of multi- 
tudes of those who hear me. 

He has done so with sincerity. He believes 
earnestly in Jesus Christ. To lay any other 
foundation than that laid once for all in Him, 
would be abhorrent as much to his feeling of 
reverence as to his sense of duty. 



12 THE WORK BURNED 

Would to Cod, my brethren, that even this 
first assumption could be safely made of all ! 
that there were none, in all days and in our 
days, who undertake the Christian ministry 
without one earnest loving thought towards 
Him who is its great subject ! If that to which 
we are passing on is a word of anxious thought 
for all, that which we are first assuming is of 
itself a condemning word for some. Other 
foundation, St Paul says, can no man lay: 
and yet how many are essaying that impos- 
sible enterprise ! How many even of the 
I Church's pastors are bringing each man his 
little load of materials for the great building, 
and piling it up upon the cold naked earth, 
careless whether the one, the only foundation 
be under it or quite apart ! 

Christian brethren, might the thought be 
written in all our hearts, It is an impertinence 
in me to assume the ministerial name, unless 
my conscience is witness that I go forth to 



AND TEE WORKMAN SAVED. 13 

bear it in behalf of Christ ! Every man who j 
enters a Pulpit or passes within the Altar-rails 
of an English Church, does so on the suppo- 
sition, does so on the faith, of his being by- 
choice and purpose a minister of Jesus Christ. 
That which he speaks, he speaks ia Christ's 
name: if he comes there to speak his own 
words or to utter his own mind, he is an in- 
truder and upstart, from hearkening to whom 
may God evermore save His true flock ! 

But the person whom St Paul has in view 
stands this test. The foundation is laid ; laid 
once for all: he knows it, and he comes to 
build upon it. Is his danger therefore past ? 
Is his ministry certain to prosper ? Is his own 
reward sure % 

He is still, St Paul says, on his trial. There 
is a profitable and an unprofitable ministry 
even among the faithful. 

I would briefly indicate some of the anxie- 
ties of the office. 



U TEE WORK BURNED 

i. A man may believe in Christ, and y< I 

not exercise aright tlic Preachers office. 

(i) For example. A man may interpret 
Scripture, and yet not bring Christ out of it. 
He may delight himself in the study; he may 
be skilful in comparing Scripture with Scrip- 
ture; he may perceive with a marvellous insight 
the doctrinal contrasts and harmonies which fill 
the Volume ; he may be wise in combining and 
reconciling where careless readers see only con- 
tradiction and confusion ; he may attract listen- 
ers by the clearness of his exposition and the 
variety of his illustration : and yet in all this 
there may be no savour of Christ and no unction 
'of the Spirit. Men may come and go, depart 
and return, week by week, where he ministers ; 
may find information, find instruction ; but not 
find edification, because they find not Christ. 

This is one possibility. Here is an example 
of a ministerial work whose end is to be burned. 

(2) Again, a man may be a sincere Chris- 



AND TEE WORKMAN SAVED. 15 

tian, and may even in a sense preach Christ, 
and yet his work may be but as the wood or 
the stubble, because in the Divine he has lost 
the human: because, in other words, though 
he knows theology he knows not man ; and 
though he understands something of the glory 
of the Saviour, he is ignorant of the application 
of that Gospel to the hearts and lives of men. 
His doctrinal statements are correct and ample : 
he can discourse with feeling and beauty upon 
the great revelations of grace : but there is no 
connecting link, in his preaching, between hea- 
ven and earth, between truth and life, be- 
tween the Saviour of sinners and the sinner, 
whom He came to save. Therefore the Gospel 
which he enforces floats above his hearers in a 
region cloudy and inaccessible : they hear the 
sound thereof, but the voice they hear not: 
the revelation of Christ is become again in his 
hands as the letter which hilleth, rather than 
as the spirit which giveth life. The man should 



16 TEE WORK BURNED 

have mixed with men: he should have lived in 
tin- homes, and dived into the consciences, and 
made his way into the hearts, of Lis people: 
he Bhould have descended from the mount of 
Transfiguration, the glory still on his brow, to 
meet the demoniac child vainly struggling in 
the grasp of the strong man armed, and to say 
in Christ's name to the agonized father the all- 
powerful word, If thou canst believe, all things 
are possible unto him that believeth. 

(3) Or it may be that all the energies of a 
ministry have been turned upon controversy; 
that a congregation which came together to 
be fed with the sincere milk of the Word that 
it might grow thereby, has been occupied week 
by week and year after year with vehement 
declamation or laborious argument against some 
form of error, supposed to be the peril of the 
times, and upon which the Preacher would 
concentrate all the anxieties and all the efforts 
of souls given him to guide and lives entrusted 



AND THE WORKMAN SAVED. 17 

to him to regulate. Parishioners of country 
towns and rural villages have been warned 
from the Pulpit, Sunday by Sunday through 
a long ministry, against impending assaults 
of Romanism or lurking snares of Rationalism, 
as though these were the most formidable in- / 
fluences to be apprehended by men of flesh 
and blood, exposed to the daily temptations, j 
in their grossest forms, of the world, the flesh, | 
and the devil. And while the good sense 
of one class of hearers has been offended 
and shocked by what they felt to be an un- 
profitable restriction of topics and an unchris- 
tian vehemence of polemics, there have been 
those on whom the effect of such teaching has 
been yet more injurious ; persons who have 
but too implicitly followed its direction and 
surrendered themselves to its influence ; strain- 
ing out the gnat of heresy, only to swallow the 
camel of uncharitableness ; or, it may be, neg- 
lecting altogether the weightier matters of the 
v. s. 2 



18 THE WORK BURNED 

I Law, truth and mercy and piety and 
holiness, in the eager denunciation of errors 
which had no charm for them, or the suspicious 
investigation of stratagems which had no ex- 
!i in fact. Of a ministry predominantly 
occupied with such subjects, however sincere 
the piety or however earnest the zeal of the 
minister, we cannot but fear that the issue 
must in many cases be that which is delineat- 
ed in the text, A work lost and burned up; a 
workman saved, yet so as by fire. 

(4) There is a fourth case, easily distin- 
guishable from the former, in which a fatal 
deadness lias fallen upon a ministry in the very 
attempt to communicate to it a vigorous life. 
In these days we are accustomed to loud com- 
plaints from the world, of the sameness and 
dulness and wearisomeness of Sermons. We 
have been rebuked and we have been ridiculed 
for our inability to make preaching attractive; 
We have been told that it is the preacher's 



AXD THE WORKMAN SAVED. 19 

fault if an audience gathered at random cannot 
be made to listen to him with the same in- 
terest which is quick and lively enough over a 
newspaper or a novel. No allowance has been 
made for the unavoidable familiarity of the 
great truths of the Gospel ; none for the neces- 
sary repetitions of its doctrines and reitera- 
tions of its precepts; none, for the repugnance 
of a fallen nature, alike to promises which it 
counts visioDary, and to duties which it finds 
irksome ; none for the all-true saying of the in- 
spired Word itself, The natural man receiveth 
not the things of the Spirit of God, for they 
are foolishness unto him, neither can he know 
them, because they are spiritually discerned. 
And it is not wonderful if men charged with 
this despised ministry, and eager to rescue it 
from these reproaches, have looked this way 
and that for the power to give life to their 
Sermons and (as they would say) reality to 
their Gospel. They have been told — and they 



Tin: WORK BURNED 

partly feel it true— that, could they but I 
the attention, all would be easy; that with- 
out this all must Ik- vain: that, if they can 
catch tin' «ar. if tiny can interest the mind, if 
they can show that they are concerned with 
real things, if they can but persuade men that 
preaching is not synonymous with wearying, 
that there is a chance of a Sermon not being 
dull, they may then go on to speak of things 
higher, things eternal; may introduce, now and 
then, or at last, something of the pure Gospel, 
and hope that, the car once opened to listen, 
the heart also may eventually be moved to 
attend. In the meantime they have given 
themselves to the one aim of making their 
Sermons lively. They have counted nothing 
below the level of Pulpit gravity ; nothing too 
secular or too mundane to be made the start- 
ing-point of Sunday exhortation. They have 
spoken of [/icing a healthy tone to common life ; 
and this, not by raising earth to heaven, but 



AND THE WORKMAN SAVED. 21 

by bringing down the heavenly to the level of 
the earthly. They have forgotten that the 
Christian politician, and the Christian student, 
and the Christian man of business, come not 
together in the Lord's House to hear their own 
subjects discussed by one far less fitted to do 
so than themselves ; but rather to be reminded 
of a subject higher and nobler than their own ; 
a subject in which they may rest altogether 
from weekday toils and cares, and realize a 
loftier aim and a deeper unity, in things un- 
seen, things heavenly, things Divine. It is a 
fraud upon these worthiest members of a Chris- 
tian congregation, when the preacher, asked for 
living bread, thus offers them the lifeless stone. 
And yet even for this he has had his tempta- 
tion, and he will have his reward. The world 
will flock after a preacher who is willing to use 
its language and discuss its subjects: they will 
call his levity real, and his worldliness sensible. 
Thus more and more preaching is emptied of 



77//; WORK BURNED 

lemnity; and the man who has enjoyed 
some reputation in his day as an ambas 
for Christ divested ifnol ashamed) of his chain, 
may find, when the fire tries his work, that, in 
making it lively, be took out of it its life; that, 
in seasoning it for the world's palate, ho lost 
for it all the pungency of the salt of grace . 
Bound indeed by every tie of duty to make 
his preaching forcible, and to make it real, and 
to make it vocal to the conscience, and to make 
it applicable to the life, the actual living life, 
of those to whom he ministers, the Preacher 
does not well to forget that he has a steward- 
ship all his own, that a necessity is laid upon 
him, and that ivoc is unto him if he preach not 
the Gospel ! 

2. But the work of the ministry is not all 
preaching. Nor have we exhausted our illus- 
trations of the words now before us, when we 
have pointed out some of those directions in 
which the public ministrations of a believing 



AND TUB WORKMAN SAVED. 23 

man may spend themselves in unprofitable la- 
bour. 

A man may believe in Christ, and yet not 
exercise aright the Pastors office. 

To most natures it is a trying thing to fol- 
low up by assiduous week-day toil the instruc- 
tions of the Sunday. There is a reserve in the 
utterance of deep feelings, and a delicacy in 
seeking the confidence of others on spiritual 
subjects, and an unskilfulness in entering, at 
once closely and without offence, into contact 
with consciences, and a repugnance (just, we 
believe, and Scriptural) to every approach, how- 
ever distant, to the theory or practice of the 
confessional, which indisposes some of the best 
of men for a work requiring that they be in- 
stant in season and out of season in watching for 
souls as they that must give account. And along 
with these motives, the most favourable that 
can be suggested, for pastoral indolence or in- 
efficiency, it must be remembered too that this 



U THE WORK BURNED 

part of the work is less marked out for us than 
the more public by times and seasons; thai it 
is by it- very nature thai which may be done 
either now or then, and left undone for this day 
and that, without either outraging the expecta- 
tions of others or stirring into l<»ud reproaches 
the voice of conscience' within. When a few 
sick folk have been visited, when the school of 
the Parish has been inspected, when a demand 
or two of business or charity have been duly 
listened to and satisfied, there remains nothing 
beyond to claim as of necessity an instant acti- 
vity, and the Pastor may return to his study or 
give himself to relaxation without any present 
consciousness either of ministerial unfaithful- 
ness or a culpable indifference to duty. 

And yet more and more do we feel that the 
work of which St Paul speaks in the text is 
chiefly a work of private personal influence 
upon the hearts and souls of living men. That 
labour which is to abide the revelations of the 



AXD THE WORKMAN SAVED. 23 

Day; that labour which is not to be burned, 
but proved by the result of that last ordeal to 
have been substantial and permanent, because 
it has been heart-deep, soul-stirring, and life- 
transforming; must be done, in great part, in 
secret; done in the privacy of cottage-homes 
and by the unnoticed exertions of a perpetual 
self-sacrifice. And to these things many even 
good men are found by experience to be un- 
equal. One man will content himself with half 
a day's toil, and then go forth to be the plea- 
sant guest, the agreeable neighbour, or the 
amiable companion. Another will seclude him- 
self within his own doors, accumulating stores 
of literary or theological knowledge, or seeking 
the fame or the usefulness of a writer at the 
cost of a neglected Parish and a wasted minis- 
try. Another will turn all his thoughts to cere- 
mony and ritual; adding without stint or 
grudging to the completeness of his Church's 
building, the beauty of its decoration, or the 



Till: WORK BURNED 

number and variety of its services; but still 
turning aside from thai close daily grappling 
with dormant conscii nces and accountable souls, 
in which shall be found a reality elsewhere 
wanting, and a reward promised only to pa- 
tient continuance in toilsome and difficult and 
often thankless labour. And another, by an 
opposite developement of the same error, will 
hope to reach the high purpose of his ministry 
by an admirable arrangement of parochial ma- 
chinery; will be satisfied to have covered every 
part of the field with well-laid plans and dili- 
gent deputies; expecting the good seed to 
spring up of itself from a perfect organization, 
and counting it his business not so much to 
win or even to go in quest of souls, but rather 
to preside over the working of a complex me- 
chanism of agencies, upon which he can depend 
with confidence for the performance of God's 
work in the Souls consigned to his oversight. 
And we must not say that .such a position 



AND THE WORKMAN SAVED. 27 

is wrong in itself, or that it can be avoided by 
all men. In that excessive and disproportion- 
ate growth of Parishes, which is the inheritance 
of this generation, there must be some minis- 
tries given to superintendence, if any ministries 
are to be made available for a more truly spi- 
ritual activity. Only we should remember that, j 
just in proportion as any ministry is withdrawn 
from a direct personal contact with imperilled 
and struggling souls, in the same degree does 
it become not more but less honourable in it- : 
self, and at the same time more dangerous and 
less profitable to its holder. The less largely 
does it partake of the chief characteristic of 
the pastorship of souls, and the more cause has 
it to apprehend a miserable awakening in the 
day when some men's work shall be burned, even 
though they themselves be saved as by fire. 

Regard for the peculiar aspect of the words 
before us — the work made futile, but the work- 



THE WORK BURNBD 

man doI c >ndemned — has constrained me to 

limit thus far tin- range of their application. 
And indeed I know not that any application 
• •an 1"' more serious or more awakening than 
that which lies on their surface. A Christian 

man, a Christian minister, lias laboured all his 
life long — has preached five thousand Sermons 
— has been respected in private life, and not 
left without an auditory in public — and nothing 
has come of it! His work is burned up. Not 
one soul saved by his ministry. Not one life, 
inward and outward, really built up into a con- 
stituent stone of the Eternal Temple. Not one 
tiling done, in these thirty or forty or fifty 
years, which can abide the trial by fire, or sur- 
vive the awful day of the manifestation of the 
sons of God. Only just this — he himself saved. 
He himself escaping through the conflagration 
of a burning life's work, just with life in his 
hands, just to be suffered within the porl 
salvation, as one who has lost his labour — 



AND THE WORKMAN SAVED. 29 

fined and mulcted, St Paul calls it, in all 
that he thought himself to have earned — but 
just with the bare life given him for a prey ! 

The thought is grave and saddening: I ad- 
dress some to whom, by God's grace, it may 
even be quickening and saving this day. 

There are those here present, whose life is 
to be devoted to this work ; the work of minis- 
tering before God in holy things. Suffer, my 
friends, an older man — one w 7 ho for almost a 
quarter of a century has held this responsible 
office — to speak with you in all plainness of 
its hopes and fears. And yet more — how 
can it be otherwise? — yet more of the latter 
even than of the former. How it may be with 
others, I know not: for myself I must say that 
the experience of it is saddening even more than 
cheering. The question of the foundation is 
a grave one. Is the man himself certainly and 
personally acquainted with the great subject — 
with Christ Himself ? Has there been, in his 



THE WOttK BURNED 

days of youth and activity, a real honest grap- 
pling with the enquiry, Who and what M 
Christ! Has there been a trying, in the deep 
of the heart, of that strength which the Gospel 
Bays is in Christ only? Have natural faults, 
have youthful lusts, been seriously encountered 
and overcome, in that heart which is their 
spring, in that life which is their stream? and 
this, in the name and by the grace of our Lord 
Jesus Christ? And has lie, in these things, 
been found true and been found strong? Then, 
and then only, can you go forth with any con- 
rid* nee to build upon Him. 

But even then, it seems, you may build, 
and build vainly. Not indeed — I can scarcely 
think it — while you remain in vital daily 
vigorous communion with Him who is the 
spring and source of grace. But it is the ten- 
dency of that bias of the Fall which is in all 
of us, to swerve by little and little from the 
closeness of that communion: not least — be ye 



AND THE WORKMAN SAVED. 31 

well assured of it — in that one sacred calling 
which seems to have in it the very guarantee 
of stedfastness. It is not so. God deals not 
so unequally with His creatures, as to suffer 
one to possess holiness by office, and to bid 
another seek it through prayer and watching: 
nay, there is, in the very handling of holy 
things, a new danger of familiarity, irreverence, 
and sinful boldness: they who dwell in the 
tabernacle may begin to tremble less than is 
due before the mercyseat: they who hear the 
vessels may be tempted to take hold of the ark: 
and then, if the holiest lose its awe, what shall 
reinspire it? 

Thus by degrees those hallowed offices to 
which you now look forward with a godly fear, 
may become in a few short months things of 
routine, matters of course, professional neces- 
sities, and little more. It needs double watch- 
fulness, in that one calling, to keep the soul 
low before God, and to keep the heart tender 



THE WORK BURNED 

for man. The edge of mere feeling will be 
Insensibly blunted: public ministrations will 
eir firsl awe, and private • charity 

their first love. In the same degree the work 
of teaching will become at once easier and less 
solemn: you will bo tempted to a hastier pre- 
paration, both of thought and prayer, for the 
oft-recurring work of preaching: you will be 
weary of the old, the universal topics of grace 
and redemption : you will begin to look around 
you for texts less obvious, topics newer and less 
hackneyed, subjects of exposition more diffi- 
cult and less profitable. You will then under- 
stand why one great body of professed Chris- 
tians should remove their preachers every three 
years from the scene of ministration ; as though 
the stimulus of novelty were needful from time 
to time for the hearer, and as though art must 
assist grace in sustaining the interest of the 
preacher. "We Churchmen must cast ourselves 
more entirely upon the Spirit which quickens, 



AND THE WORKMAN SAVED. 33 

assured that the supply of His grace will ever 
be proportioned to the urgency of our need. 
Happy are they whom He so supports, in the 
hour of sinking spirits and flagging energies, 
that they still exercise themselves in digging 
from the mine and from the quarry the gold and 
silver and costly stone, and seize not with idle 
facility the wood cut to their hand, or the hay 
or the stubble which can be had for the asking I 
If days like these — days of weariness and 
languor of soul — should be the portion (as they 
may be) of any of you who are now preparing 
to gird yourselves with the sacred armour, let 
the text of this afternoon press as it ought 
upon your conscience, and stir you to a new 
effort and a godlier zeal. Say to yourselves, 
My work, God helping me, shall not be burned : 
my labour shall not have been lost, nor my 
life wasted. Poor and pitiful woidd be the 
reflection that peradventure, out of boundless 
exhaustless love, my own sold might just escape 
v. s. 3 



Till: WORK BURNED 

/ (lie wreck and rui 

I ik tine 

'it vain, and a Saviours work shamefully 
trifled with/ If my work is burned, it will 

be because I have so ministered as that none 
are the better for it; because no soul has been 
quickened by my Gospel, and no life trans- 
formed by my supervision. Shame then on the 
laggart who has let others perish, and only 
just looked to himself/ Shame -on the hire- 
liny pastor, who took no heed to his doctrine, 
and could not lash himself into energy in be- 
half of dying undying souls! God quicken in 
me yet once more the grace of repentance, and 
the grace of perseverance, the grace of Divine 
love, of Christian ~eal, and of human charity! 

And for us, and for all — whether engaged, 
or preparing to engage, in this work or that — 
work (as we speak) sacred, or work (as we 
speak) common — let the word of exhortation 
curry with it its own enlivening sound, while 



AND THE WORKMAN SAVED. 35 

it tells of a coming Day of world-wide, soul- 
deep, and life-embracing scrutiny. There are 
those, it says to us, whose work will be burned ; 
the work of a whole life ; judged justly, pro- 
nounced worthless, finally consumed and de- 
stroyed. That which is true of one calling is 
assuredly true of all. If even sacred work — 
and the work (remember) of a believing man — 
may be doomed to this burning; might we 
not say, Much more that work which was al- 
together of the earth ; that work which had no 
profession of Christ in it ; that work which 
sought only self, whether self-aggrandisement, 
self- ostentation, or self-humouring ? How need- 
ful is it, Christian friends, that you, forecasting 
your life (as at this time) in youth, should 
first of all plan it well; plan it, that is, in 
the serious pondering of this question, What 
is that work in which I can best serve God, 
and have something left of it when the fire 
tries^ I know indeed that there is no recog- 

3—2 



Tin: WORK BURNED 

nized lawful calling of English life, in which a 
man may qo1 serve God, and have something 
left of bis work to follow him when he dies. 
But I know this also— and no false compliment 
should make us hide it — that there are pro- 
fessions in which there is the smallest possible 
material for usefulness, and professions in which 
there is the greatest: professions in which 
whatever a man does of good to his brother is 
done as it were by stealth and contrivance, or 
against the grain ; done without any help from 
his profession, done in spite of it, and by s< izing 
or making rare opportunities which it is more 
than probable that he will miss or lose; pro- 
fessions, on the other hand, not only full of 
openings for good, but themselves constituting 
a life-long opening; professions which are them- 
selves a talent, and the chief of talents; 
summoning a man to daily acts of good, and 
loudly rebuking him if he does them not. Let 
the question, In what manner of life can J, 



AND THE WORKMAN SAVED. 37 

such as I am in character and in circumstances, 
most hopefully look for something to remain 
of my work in the great day of account ? be 
deeply and diligently pondered beforehand by 
all whom God has placed here on the threshold 
of that manhood in which they are to live 
their probation and sow for their reaping. 

And let us, older men, whose day of grace 
is already far spent, be like them and with 
them, at least thus far, in this questioning ; 
that we determine, God helping us, not to find 
in the end that life has been a disappointment, 
because nothing real, nothing permanent, no- 
thing of God and for God, has ever been done 
in it. Are we ministers of Christ? let us wait 
on our ministry. Are we instructors, are we 
watchmen and guardians of the younger and 
the less experienced ? let us look to it that we 
desire with an unselfish zeal the soul's good of 
those for whom we labour. Are we men of 
letters, of science, of authorship? 0, great 



Till: WORK BURNED, Ac. 

need then have we — we as much as any — to 
Bee to it thai do self-seeking, no eager hungry 
pursuit of knowledge which is to be our own 
enjoym< nt, be the constraining motive of our 
diligence and of our toil. Lot us sec that we 
all — in various ways, for there are diversities 
of operations — yet with one end in view, for 
of God and through God and to God are all 
things — be indeed workmen at the great Tem- 
ple ; earnestly bringing to it and cheerfully 
lavishing upon it every faculty and every en- 
dowment^ the gold and the silver and the 
precious stone of our individual being; that 
so, when the Day is revealed, and revealed in 
fire, we may hear the joyful commendation, 
Well done, good and faithful servant, thou hast 
been faithful in a very little: thou saidst indeed 
oftentimes below, / have laboured in vain, I 
have spent my strength for nought and in vain ; 
yet now is thy reward before thee, and thy 
work safe with thy God ! 



II. 

THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 



II. 



TEE INDIVIDUAL HIEING. 

Matt. xx. 7. 
No man hath hired us. 

The rich young man has asked his question, 
and gone away sorrowful. Type of many 
rich men, and of many young men — of many 
great men and learned men and self-righteous 
men — in every land and age, he came running 
(St Mark says) in sign of eagerness ; he kneel- 
ed to Jesus (St Mark says) and called Him 
good, in sign of reverence and of devotion ; he 
proposed to Him the greatest of all questions, 
and listened respectfully to the Divine answer : 



42 Till: INDIVIDUAL TURING. 

all this he did: and yet, when the call came 
home to him; bade him part with his tp 
and count all things else but loss for Christ; 
then he turned away: not in scorn, not in 
defiance, not in anger: he was sad at that 
saying — he fful—for he had 

great possessions, 

How is the same scene enacted year after 
year in a Christian country, within a Christian 
Church! Men want heaven: but they cannot 
part with earth. Men ask what they must do : 
but if it be not what they wish to do, they 
go away; go, like the wounded animal, with the 
arrow in them; go sad, go sorrowful; yet go, 
and go finally. They would have done many 
things, but they will not do the one thing: they 
will even bear a cross, and bear it manfully — 
but it is not the cross which Christ imposes, 
it is not the crofi i on which Jesus hung. 

The sighi of this departure, and the Sa- 
viour's commenl upon it, drew from the still 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 43 

self-ignorant Peter a self- congratulating ex- 
clamation. Behold, ice have forsaken all, and 
followed thee : we have not refused the test of 
sincerity: we heard Thy call, and came after 
Thee without gainsaying and without dallying: 
what shall we have therefore ? The words im- 
plied two errors. There was something of the 
Pharisee's tone in them : God, I thank Thee 
that I am not as other men are. And there was 
something of a bargaining spirit in them : This 
have I done, now ivhat shall I have I And 
therefore the all-discerning Reader of hearts, 
the all- wise Physician of souls, while He frank- 
ly and fully renews to His disciple the great 
charter of promise — assures him of the hundred- 
fold now, and of the eternal life hereafter — yet 
fails not to interpose, before He leaves the 
subject, the word also of warning. Remember, 
He says in effect, the strange falls and risings 
which occur in the Gospel way ; the marvellous 
disappointments and surprises, upsettings and 



ii THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 

hich take place, in human life and 
Christian, between birth and the grave: how 
many, now first, shall one day le last . 
many, now lagging behind, shall in tlte en* 
strip the foremost, and even take their crown: 
tit" n standest by faith : loast not against the 
folk n : be not high-minded, but fear. 

To enforce this lesson, our Lord added and 
spake a Parable; from the midst of which the 
text of this day is taken. 

The possessor of a vineyard wants labour- 
ers for its culture. At an early hour he visits 
the market-place of a neighbouring town, 
and finds there — the custom is still some- 
times exemplified, wo are told, in Eastern 
lands — a number of men waiting, spade in 
hand, for the opportunity of a hiring. He 
makes his bargain, and Bends them into tbe 
vineyard. 

Tbe supply Is insufficient. Again and again, 
as tbe day advances, he revisits the market- 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 45 

place, and each time finds new candidates for 
employment and wages. These later recruits, 
unlike the earliest, accept a general instead of 
a particular promise: Whatsoever is right, he 
says, I ivill give you. 

The day wears to its close, yet even then- 
one hour only from sunset — the proprietor re- 
peats his visit to the place of hiring, Find- 
ing some, at that latest hour, still unoccupied, 
he asks them, Why stand ye here all the day 
idle 1 And when they reply, Because no man 
hath hired us, he removes the excuse by en- 
gaging them for himself. 

And now the even is come. The steward 
is directed to begin with the last-engaged, and 
to give them their hire. To the astonishment 
of all — their own not least — they received each 
one the denarius which was to be the wages 
of the day. The unwonted generosity rouses 
the expectation of an advance for all. The 
first-hired thought now that the bargain for 



48 Tin: INDIVIDUAL HIRING, 

the denarius would be replaced by a more 
libera] scale of recompense. What was their 
disappointment, when they found themselves 
held to the engagement, and repaid, for twelve 
hours of toil, with the piece given for onel 
They ventured to remonstrate against this ini- 
quitous equality. These last, they .said, have 
wro \ght but one hour; and thou had made 
tin m equal unto us, which have borne the burden 
and heat of the day. But the reply was ready 
and peremptory. Friend, I do thee no wrong: 
was not the denarius thy stipulation? thou 
hast it : what if another, out of my mere 
bounty, lias it too? Is it not lawful for me to 
do what I will with mine own '. art thou to 
grudge and be dissatisfied, because it pleases 
me to I '(• 1 literal \ 

Even thus is it, our Lord says, in that work 
and that destiny of human life, for the sake of 
which the Parable was spoken. There too shall 
there be later workers and earlier. There too 



THE IX DIVIDUAL HIRING. 47 

shall there be first called and after called. God 
giveth not account of His matters. What if it 
pleases Him, of whom are all things, to call the 
despised Gentile, late in time, into Israel's heri- 
tage, and as it were of the stones to raise up 
children to Abraham ? What if He shall stop, 
in the mid career of unbelief and persecution, 
a man whom He is pleased to speak of as al- 
ready a chosen vessel, and set him, born out of 
due time, side by side with thee in the ranks of 
the Apostleship 1 Or what if, as the world runs 
its round, it shall be His good pleasure, now 
and then, to change, late in life, by the miracle 
of His grace, a scoffer or a libertine, a self- 
ruined sinner or a dying malefactor, into a 
monument of mercy t What is that to thee? 
Canst thou not rejoice, with a joy disinterested 
and noble, over these proofs of the sovereignty 
of thy Sovereign, of the Omnipotence of that 
grace which is thy hope 1 Take good heed to 
thyself that thou grudge not against thy brother! 



Till: INDIVIDUAL Jill:! 

that thou c ' • ly call and 

with his w d lit' 

mparisons arc a 
in thee. They show not the mind which was 
in Christ Jesus, If He had thought of merit, 
no man — neither the oilier, nor yet thou — /""/ 
seen salvation. Look to thyself: fur this 
disposition is a sign of danger. The first mag 
he last, as well as the last first. Nay, remem- 
ber, that in this life no man is absolutely safe 
for heaven. Not only may the order change, 
and the foremost of to-day he the hindmost of 
to-morrow : more yet, and worse than this; the 
fairest promise of grace may be reversed, 
blighted, ruined altogether: the indulgence of 
one fault is of the nature of a final fall : many 
be called, but few chosen. 

Such may be the Contexture and such the 
main Bcope of the Parable as originally uttered 
to the first disciples. But it has been well 
said, These doctrinal narratives of Jesus are 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 49 

like many-sided precious stones, cut so as to 
cast their lustre in more than one direction. 
To them may be applied, with all reverence, 
the words spoken by St Paul in regard to one 
of the plain patriarchal histories, Which things 
are an allegory. They are so framed and so 
recorded as to bear a meaning not so much 
other than, as besides, that which lies on their 
surface. Just as in the narration of a family 
discord within the curtains of a Patriarch's tent, 
there lies concealed a prophecy of the ever- 
lasting conflict which is betwixt the Church of 
God and the world of man ; a conflict of na- 
tural and spiritual, of earthly and heavenly, of 
faith and sight, of Christ and sin ; so that we 
may behold there, as in a glass, two dispensa- 
tions, and two states, and two characters, and 
two destinies, ever repeating themselves in the 
history of all time : even so, even more it may 
be, we can discover in our Lord's Parables a 
variety and a versatility and a manifoldness of 
V. S. 4 



50 THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 

teaching, which renders them ever oewi 
constant ; applicable to every changing circum- 
stance, t i every congregatioD of the Chnrch 
and to every individual amongst His people 

And for this day I desire to separate from 
the rest of the Parable before us the five words 
of the text itself; hoping and praying that 
they may be so carried home to the hearts 
here lying naked and opened before the eye of 
God, that a new start may be taken by some 
in the life of Christ — a new hope quickened, 
and an altered life begun. 

The lord of the vineyard says to some 
whom he finds loitering in one of life's market- 
places, Why stand ye here all the day idle? 
And their answer is, that no man has hired 
them. 

The fragment of the Parable is itself a 
Parable. 

i. There is a God who concerns Himself 
about us; leeks upon us with an intuition as 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 51 

keen as it is merciful; observes where we are, 
and what ; how the life is spent, how the heart 
is disposed; knows by what precise steps we 
have mounted, or else descended, to our pre- 
sent standingplace ; comes in, as it were, day 
by day, to notice and to question : nay, needs 
not to come in, because He is here ; here, in 
the necessity of a Divine Omnipresence ; here, 
in the spontaneity of a Divine Love. 

2. And this God has a work going on 
amongst His creatures, and a vineyard in 
which that work has to be done. 

Doubtless He has a work going on every- 
where : space and time are alike full of 
Him : His kingdom is an everlasting king- 
dom, the eyes of all wait upon Him, He tell- 
eih the number of the stars, He openeth His 
hand and filleth all things living with plenteous- 
ness. 

But all these are works in which man 

cannot aid Him. In these things He works 

4—2 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 

alone ; alone, with the Son of 1 1 - I ■••, and 
with the Spiril of Hia power; for these 
things He hath no vineyard, nor doth J le 
rning these things, ll'Ay stand 
ye idle? 

TJie vineyard of the Lord of Jiosts is the 
house of Israel. The work for which He em-i 
ploys man is the work of man's culture : it is 
wrought in the Church of His redeemed, and 
the living energies of His redeemed are the 
workmen therein. 

The work is a twofold work. It has an 
inward and it has an outward aspect. 

(i) The individual soul is a vineyard, and 
itself has the charge of it. The watching and 
tending, the keeping and guarding, of the heart 
within — that heart out of which are the issues 
of the life — this is one chief department of God's 
work : to cleanse this from noisome and deadly 
weeds, to plant this with the choicest vine, to 
keep it night ami day (as the Prophet writes] 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 53 

under God's keeping, to subject it every mo- 
ment (as the Prophet writes) to God's watering, 
to seek for it evermore the dew of His blessing, 
the rain of His grace, the sunshine of His 
countenance, and the furtherance of His in- 
crease — is one part, the first and foremost part, 
of that work, with regard to which He says to 
His creatures, Go ye into my vineyard, and 
whatsoever is right I will give you. 

(2) And life too is a vineyard. I speak 
now not of the individual soul, but of the life 
of man as it is lived among his fellows. 

The home is one part of it. The life of the 
family : in which each one (to speak generally) 
is at first a son and a brother; afterwards a 
master, a husband, a father ; has to comport 
himself either thus or thus, towards his asso- 
ciates, in various relations, within the walls of 
a common dwelling : in presence, kindly, con- 
siderately, tenderly, lovingly — or else (if so it 
be) coldly, selfishly, thoughtlessly, churlishly; 



U THE INDIVIDUAL HIRT1 

in absence, witb longing loving thoughts, fre- 
quent communication by letter, a resolute pur- 
■ i do honour to his name and bring joy to 
his home — or else (if so it be) with practical 
•. careless forgetfulness, long intervals of 
Bilence, a reckless disregard of home wishes, 
interests, and prayers — it may be, even a de- 
vouring of a father's substance with harlots, 
and a dishonouring of a spotless name . by 
wicked riotous living. Here is one little spot 
of the outward vineyard — home, kindred, fa- 
mily — in which God bids us work, and in 
which many, rather than work, will stand (in 
God's sight) all the day idle. 

Every community in which we are tem- 
porarily or permanently incorporated, would 
furnish an equally just and true example. Such 
is the community of a School or a College: in 
each of which we may — yea, we must — either 
do good or do evil. If we set a bright ex- 
ample of innocence and industry, of coinage 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 55 

and devotion, of faithful friendship and honour- 
able subordination ; if we make no secret of 
being Christians, though we neither obtrude 
that faith offensively on another nor parade it 
ostentatiously in ourselves ; if we do the work 
which is set us, cultivate the talents given, 
make preparation for future usefulness by 
laying up those stores of knowledge which (in 
most cases) must now or never be acquired ; • 
and all this, not in feverish eagerness, not in 
the greedy pursuit of honour, not in the mis- 
placing or interchanging of ends and means, 
but on principle, as a duty, with a view to the 
long future and to the boundless age: then, 
thus far, we are labourers in God's vineyard : 
in this most critical season of life we are 
already doing His work, and seldom — never 
within my experience — has a youth thus 
speut been followed by a worthless man- 
hood or a wretched old age. Such as are 
planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish 



77//: INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 

tVi the courts of the house of our God. 

d! bring forth more fruit in their a 
That they may shew how true the Lord my 
strength is: and that there is no unrighi 

'n Him. 

The river of life flows on, and becom* a 
parted into a thousand streams. We Bit here 
by the well, drawing from a common source 
the water of Divine and human knowledge. 
But soon this place will know us no more : for 
good or for evil, the time of our sojourning 
here will have been accomplished, and we must 
go forth, full or empty, resolved or purpose- 
less, to do or to neglect the work of Clod in a 
wider and a more various vineyard. 

I camml follow to-day — the I ime forbids me, 
even if the track were disclosed — the diverse 
fortunes of this which is now a congregation, 
as it spreads itself over the manifold fields, at 
home or abroad, of English life. Men of wealth 
and leisure — men of public or professional ac- 



THE IX DIVIDUAL HIRING. 57 

tivity — clergymen, lawyers, merchants, soldiers, 
politicians — your diversities of operation will 
be as many, as your tastes and characters, your 
principles and ambitions, your length of days 
and earthly destinies, are various. Thirty years 
hence, or twenty, or ten, and the All-seeing E}-e 
alone will be able to re-gather within its ken 
the members of this one concourse. Now so 
closely united in place and duty and interests — 
then scattered to the four winds in work and 
in habitation, some gone already to their reck^ 
oning, others still sowing, certainly if uncon- 
sciously, for the world's last harvest! 

And yet — for this is the subject — amidst all 
this variety there will be a unity still. You 
cannot escape, go where you may, the call to 
be God's workmen. His vineyard is coextensive 
with earth, and his labourers are, or might be, 
not one here and one there, but all human 
beings — men — mankind. God bids the clergy- 
man to go into His vineyard; bids him handle 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 

sacred implements devoutly and for Bis glory; 
bids him Bel before himself one object — to 
make Christ known upon earth — to save hi/a- 
nd them thai hear him. And the clergy- 
man may either obey this call or disobey it. 
Jlr may, if he will, stand idle at the very gate, 
amidst the plants or beside the tower and 
win' tat, of the vineyard. There is nothing in 
that sacred calling which enforces or secures 
devotion. Nor is the call to him substantially 
different from the call to any other. God calls 
the lawyer too, and the soldier, and the states- 
man, to go and work in His vineyard. You 
escape not the sound of that voice, though you 
rise up (like a Prophet of old) to flee unto 
Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. Even 
there shall Jit's hand lead, thee, and His right 
hand shall hold tJ/ce. He bids you make life 
His vineyard, and work in it for Him. He 
bids you, He bids us all, alike and equally, 
first to work for Him in the vineyard o\i the 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 59 

soul, and then to work for Him in the vine- 
yard of the life. He bids us, in other words, 
to believe in Jesus Christ with all our hearts ; 
to look to Him alone for salvation ; and to live 
no longer to ourselves, but unto him who died 
for us and rose again. He bids us to love God 
with all our strength, and to love man, for His 
sake, as ourselves. He bids us set before our- 
selves, late and early, in youth and age, this 
one object; so to live as to make others better 
— so to live as to make God known. 

3. Friends and brethren, this is, in brief, 
that call of which we speak to-day; the call 
into God's vineyard. And now what say we ? 
You are here — none of you quite in the early 
morning — that is gone by : say, at the very 
best, about the third hour of life ; some pre- 
cious years already behind you ; gone, yet not 
done with : and we are here with you, it may 
be at the ninth hour, it may be — God only 
knows— already at the eleventh: and still the 



Tin: INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 

same call -calm, grave, patient, longsufFeri 
U in all our ears; Go, work to-day in my 
yard! And whaf are we answering to it I 
Axe we at work there — ad 
already described — at work in God's vineyard 
of the soul ? at work in God's vineyard of 
the life? 

Or are we, as in God's sight, still standing 
idle in the world's great market-place? AW 
may bu diligent men, as man counts diligence, 
and yet utterly idle in the account of God: 
Kjiliraiiii is an empty vine, saith the Prophet: 
why? he bringeik forth fruit to himself : thus 
a selfish life is an idle life, when the weights 
and measures of the sanctuary are applied to 
it: and where () where is he amongst us, whose 
life is nol selfish ' 

Or are we, once again, saying to the hea- 
venly Summoner, T go, Sir, and yet not going? 
always about to enter — always promising, in- 
tending, resolving to enter — always just on 



THE 1NBIVIDVAL HIRING'. 61 

the point of being religious, only just wait- 
ing, for this moment and that, to go into God's 
vineyard, to be His entirely, and His for life I 
the procrastinating spirit, in these matters, 
which is in all of us! None have resolved 
against religion: God forbid! but where is 
that prompt and vigorous action, in the things 
of the soul, which distinguishes so many of 
you in the exercises of the body and in the 
activities of the intellect? 

Or are we, yet once more — for to this 
point I am tending — saying, in reply to the 
Divine question, Wliy stand ye here all the 
day idle ? Because no man hath hired us ? 
Yes, there may be other reasons, and many of 
them, why we are not better men, and more 
earnest, and more religious: there may be a 
deep indwelling spirit of doubt, making evi- 
dence inconclusive, and stopping prayer at its 
source : or there may be some cherished bosom 
lust, which must go if Christ comes, and which 



Till: INDIVIDUAL EIRINQ. 

i7e cannot and will not and scarcely pro! 
dismiss: these things there may he: and they 
account at once for any idleness, and any loit- 
ering, and any disobedience to the summons 
Into God's vineyard, His twofold vineyard, the 
vineyard of the soul and the vineyard of the 
life: but there is also, in many, a subtler but 
not less real impediment than either of these: 
and it is specially with a view to this hindrance 
that I chose the exact words of the text, No 
man hath hired us. 

It is common enough, no doubt, to deal in 
this place with the difficulties of belief; to en- 
counter the prevalent forms of doubt, and to 
furnish you over and over again with reasons 
strong and ample for the faith which ought to 
be in us. And perhaps it is not uncommon to 
deal in this place with the other obvious im- 
pediment, that which springs from the state 
of the heart in reference to definite sin; that 
which keeps a man back from a religious life 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 63 

by enchaining him to some sinful habit which 
he is powerless of himself to break through. 
But I would take rather a case such as 
this. 

A man is deeply convinced, in conscience 
and heart, of the duty of living a Christian life. 
He is not so foolish as to justify to himself the 
postponement of such a life to a more con- 
venient season. He knows that if there be 
a time suitable to the love of God and man, 
it is the season of youth ; before the evil days 
come, and the years in which he will say, 
I have no pleasure in them. And therefore he 
not only desires to be religious, but he would 
give all he possesses to live the life of God. 

But in the midst of these good desires 
and holy aspirations he finds himself again 
and again checked and hindered by some form 
or other of this question, What right have I 
to regard myself as a child of God? How 
do I know that I am entitled to call God my 



(1 77//; INDIVIDUAL HIRING, 

Father '. It is pr 

ful, to i nU r upon a life wh 

if it h, not heart-deep, presumption 

if it I If I am to go 

out on any errand of charity; if I am f 

■ or a sick person, or to perform any of 
the offices of religious ministration; I must do 
so on the supposition that I have a right to be a 
christian. If I am to say a word of counsel 
or warning to a friend icliose sold is in danger, 
or in any oilier definite way to endeavour to 
make Christ known as the Saviour of sinners, 
[must do so with the tacit assumption that I 
dm myself a disciple. If I am even to kneel 
down to pray — except indeed my prayer be the 
mere vague inarticulate muttering of a dis- 
tressed and enquiring soul — I must do so on the 
ground, of a relationship to God which belongs 
only to a Christian. And these are just the 

assumptions which I cannot make. I see other* 
\ng into the vineyard: they seem to have 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. (55 

no doubt as to the appropriation of the summons : 
they tell one they knoiv that God is their Father, 
and that their service is accepted of Him for 
the Lords sake. For myself, I can only answer, 
when the Divine question is put to me, Why 
standest thou here all the day idle? Because, 
Lord, no man hath hired me. 

This is a hindrance which in many persons 
begins early, and ends late, or never. It keeps 
back many a thoughtful and many a well- 
disposed man from ever entering with quiet 
confidence upon the work of either the inward 
or the outward vineyard. And many things 
foster it. Evangelical doctrine itself has too 
much cherished it. The demand for conversion 
— -just and needful as it is — may be so put as 
to deter. Conversion, on an Apostle's lips, was 
a turning from darkness to light and from the 
power of Satan unto God. It was the trumpet- 
call of Gospel hope. He did not say, Wait 
till you are converted: wait till something has 
v. s. 5 



Tin: INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 

m : wait till you have /'< w and 

wid faith and hope: and then come 

to Christ. Rather he said, This is a faithful 

saying and worthy of all acceptation; Christ 

came into the world to save sinners, and 

' <re to save you: the work is J lis; the 

work is done: you are included because the 

world is included: lie is the propitiation for 

our sins, and not for ours only, but also for 

the sins of the whole world. 

And while this was his language to the 
idolatrous Gentile and the blaspheming Jew, 
what was it to the community of the already 
baptized? Was it, in addressing a Christian 
parent, Pray for the conversion of your childl 
Was it, Watch over him and influence him 
and pray God for him, if perhaps — later on 
in youth, or it may be in remote manhood — 
he may receive the grace of conversion, and be 
able at last to call your God his God? And 
was it, if he ever deigned to address himself 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 67 

to the child, Cry out as you may, in the igno- 
rance and blindness of your heart, for a con- 
verting grace which shall at last overbear nature 
and make God your God? think not to say 
within yourself, I am one of the baptized, I 
have a Christian man for my father, and there- 
fore I am within the pale of the covenant and 
the reach of grace : rest not in such vain con-' 
fidences, hut seek conversion as your one needy 
and enter at last, as your father entered, through 
the strait gate of a bitter penitence and a trem- 
bling hope ? how different the blessed en- 
couragement actually written on that sacred 
page ! Else were your children unclean, but 
now they are holy. Children, obey your parents 
in the Lord — -already there, already in the Lord, 
because you are among the consecrated, chil- 
dren of grace : And, ye fathers, bring them up 
in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Yes, 
the Redemption is world-wide : and the appro- 
priation of Redemption is coextensive with the 

5—2 



cs Tin: INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 

baptized. He who is born into the world is bom 
into a redeemed world: he who is dedicated t<> 
Chrisl in Baptism has his call, has his promise, 
has his consecration and his sonship. He 
cannot say afterwards, No man hath hired me. 
He must not say afterwards, I know not whether 
God has summoned me; whether God recog- 
nizes me as inside II is vineyard; I must wait 
till something passes within me; some voice per- 
haps of effectual calling, which shall interpret 
to me and bring into me Christ's Gospel; and 
then peradventure I shall be justified in ad- 
dressing God as my Father, and setting myself 
to work fur Him in a world which shall have 
become for me His vineyard* The world,because 
it is redeemed, is His vineyard : and I, be- 
cause I am a baptized man, am His work- 
man. 

The lengthening experience of life, and an 
enlarg-in-- intercourse with human consciences, 
Btrongly impresses us, Christian friends, with 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 69 

the prevalence of this hindrance to a devoted 
life. So fertile is the ingenuity of that self- 
righteousness which is in all of us by nature 
that, when it is hunted out of this lurking- 
place, it ever seeks refuge in that ; and when 
it has become an axiom of religion that we 
are saved not by works but by faith, then 
faith itself is made into a work, and placed not 
in the light of the hand which just receives 
out of Christ's fulness, but rather of the con- 
dition which must be satisfied before we can 
even come to receive. And thus also the 
blessed grace of repentance is not set before 
men as the self-renunciation and self-abhorrence 
which arises out of the sight of God's holiness 
and of the cross of Christ, but rather as some 
ugly and repulsive preliminary which must be 
brought with us ready-made as our passport and 
introduction into the very possibilities of grace. 
The cry, No man hath hired me, goes up still 
from many a distressed and sin-laden heart, 



70 THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 

even within the precincts of God's sanctuary, 
even within the Chv/rch which lie hath pur- 
chased with His own blood. 

If there be amongst us this day but one 
person who has feared hitherto to write himself 
among God's people; one soul which cannot 
see its election, one ear which cannot hear its 
calling; let that person try this day the ex- 
periment of a brighter and more assured hope : 
let him cast away, once and for ever, these 
lingering vestiges — for such they are — of a 
subtle and paralyzing self-righteousness: let 
him cast himself upon the universality of the 
Redemption, upon the individuality of the bap- 
tismal sealing, and say unto God, Doubtless 
Thou art my Father — my Father and the guide 
of my youth : this God shall be my God for 
ever and ever : lie sltall be my guide unto death 
— yea, through death, and even for evermore I 

It is an evil thing and bitter to stand all 
the day in the marketplace idle, because we 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIEING. 71 

cannot see that any man hath hired us. No 
life is more miserable than that which halts 
between two purposes and two opinions ; misses 
both worlds ; and, with duty felt and Christ be- 
lieved in, yet never sets itself to do the one or 
to serve the other. 

The Parable speaks of a laborious calling, 
and makes the workman complain of the bur- 
den of the day and the burning desert wind. 
My friends, that burden is not avoided, that 
wind is not escaped, by those who stand idle. 
Life will have its load for each one of us, 
whether in God's vineyard or out of it. The 
cares of life, the toils of life, the sorrows of life, 
are not lightened by living to ourselves. The 
scorching Sirocco will beat upon us equally — 
the sudden access of calamity, inward or out- 
ward; the cruel blast of calumny, or the wither- 
ing breath of disappointment — whether we be 
keeping close to Christ, or living without God 
in the world. The only difference will be, Shall 



7i* THE INDIVIDUAL HIRING. 

we have a Friend with us in all, a Friend con- 
stant in love and changeless as eternity? or shall 
we live alone in spirit, and die (terrible words) 
to ourselves? The choice is ours now: God 
give us grace to make that choice wisely ! 

The longest day has its evening : and so is 
it with the long day of life. At last the Lord 
of the vineyard shall say to His steward, Call 
the labourers, and give them their hire. If you 
are ever tempted to count religion difficult or 
duty irksome; to compare your lot, as one re- 
cognizing the call of God and desiring to do the 
will of Christ, with the easier and more self- 
indulgent career of a man who still lives for 
himself; then look onward, across a few, more 
or less toilsome and trying, years below, to that 
sweet hour of calm, that sunset which is also 
a dawn, when the voice of God Himself shall 
release you from service, and bid you enter for 
ever the rest and the inheritance. None will 
say then, that he has either laboured too earn- 



THE INDIVIDUAL HIEING. 73 

estly, suffered too severely, or waited too long. 
God shall wipe aivay all tears from their eyes; 
and there shall he no more death, neither sorrow, 
nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: 
for the former things are passed away. 



III. 

THE REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE OF 
DISEASE AND DEATH. 



PREACHED IN AID OF THE FUNDS OF 
ADDENBROOKE'S HOSPITAL. 



III. 

THE REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE OF 
DISEASE AND DEATH. 

i Cor. xi. 30 — 32. 

For this cause many are weak and sickly among 
you, and many sleep. For if we would judge 
ourselves, ive should not be judged. But ivhen 
we are judged, ive are chastened of the Lord, 
that we should not be condemned with the 
world. 

Every School has its work and its discipline : 

it is so with the School of God. 

We have spoken on two occasions of life's 

work: to day (as the special occasion bids us) 

we are to speak a few plain words upon God's 

discipline. 



78 THE REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE 

And we choose for this purpose one of 
ih'»sc unique texts of which we spoke at the 
outset of this brief course: a text embedded 
in a passage of undying interest, in reference 
to the most distinctive and the most sacred of 
Gospel ordinances, the holy Sacrament of the 
body and blood of our Saviour Christ; but 
itself too so marvellous in its disclosure of un- 
expected dealing — so solemn in its warning, and 
withal so bright with blessed hope — that it 
courts examination and rewards diligent study, 
if the presence (not unsought) of the inspiring 
Spirit be with us in the reading, the hearing, 
and the pondering. 

The idolatry of antiquity is one of the 
many opposite dangers which beset the Church 
of all time. Just better, it may be, than the 
lust of innovation or the vanity of self-satisfac- 
tion, it is yet itself an error, and it may run on 
nto a sin. It is an ingratitude to God for 
many present advantages, it is a disparagement 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 79 

of the guiding and developing hand of His 
Providence, it is almost a denial of the assur- 
ance of Christ, Lo, I am with you alway, if we 
imagine (as many have done) that the Church 
sprang full-grown and perfect from the new 
birth of Pentecost, and degenerated from that 
original maturity in proportion as she advanced, 
by years or by centuries, from her nativity and 
her baptism. We learn a different lesson from the 
inspired page itself. It is not enough to show 
that a certain thing was believed in primitive 
Ephesus, or done in primitive Corinth, in order 
to prove that the one was true or the other 
right; that either the one or the other was 
according to the will of God, or a portion of 
the integral faith delivered once for all to the 
saints. 

The chapter now before us lifts the veil 
from one surprising feature of the Church of 
Corinth in Apostolical times. 

If there be an institution guarded and 



THE REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE 

! by a peculiar reverence, it La the ordi- 
nance of Eoly Communion. Even to a fault 
it has been bo. Men careless in life and un- 
believing in cpiiiioii — utterly indifferent how 
they profaned or trifled with ought else in the 
Christian faith or worship — have yet shrunk, 
with a superstitious dread, from tampering with 
the Lord's Supper. To that one sacred me- 
morial they have transferred all the reverence 
and all the scrupulosity which ought to have 
been diffused over everything ordained by the 
word or consecrated by the touch of Christ. If 
only they abstained from defiling by a worldly or 
sinful contact that one last bequest of dying 
love, they thought it but a small thing to de- 
secrate tin- ordinance of Common Prayer: nay, 
they thought it but a small thing to break the 
command through life, or to postpone the com- 
mand till death, to do t/tis, to oat of the bread and 
drink of the cup, in remembrance of the Cross 
and Passion. It was no hypocrisy, they thought, 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 81 

to meet in the congregation for worship; no 
untruth to repeat Creeds which for them meant 
nothing, or to join in Litanies which for them 
asked nothing ; no profaneness to exchange 
smiles or whispers in the sanctuary, to turn 
Sermons into ridicule, or to point their sarcasms 
and wing their jests with Scripture; provided 
only they regularly turned their backs upon 
the Table spread for Communion, and stood 
aloof from that one single act to which they 
confined their whole idea of religious profession 
and ceremonial sanctity. 

How far this feeling — predominant in the 
Church of England within the recollection of 
many, and not without a certain rough use in 
keeping consciences alive and the very idea of 
sanctity extant amongst men — may have been 
formed or fostered by the language (in some 
parts) of this very chapter, it is needless to 
enquire and unprofitable to know. But it is 
certainly remarkable that the one point on 
V. s. 6 



R2 Tin: REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE 

which the conscience of the t8th century was 
awake, was a point on which the conscience of 
the first age in Borne communities) was already 
dormant. Eere was the ( Jhurch of Corinth, in 

St Paul's own lifetime, desecrating the Lord's 
Supper by disorder and intemperance. Associ- 
ating with it in sign of brotherly Christian 
union a common meal — to be begun or closed by 
the celebration of the sacred rite of Communion 
itself — they made it first of all an opportunity 
of displaying the worst selfishnesses of class and 
the worst discords of party, and they ended by an 
i xhil lition of excess and intoxication, every where 
wretched and shameful, but here shocking too 
and horrible. 

It is in the course of his reproof of this pro- 
fanation that St Paul introduces the words of 
the text. 

You must have forgotten, he says, the time 
and the objecl of the institution of this ordi- 
nance of Communion, Xou must have forgotten 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 83 

that the time was the night in which Christ our 
Lord was betrayed, and the object the com- 
memoration of His death for sin. Take, eat, He 
said : This is my body. . . 27m cup is the new testa- 
ment in my blood... As often therefore as ye eat 
this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the 
Lord's death till He come. Judge ye whether 
this act can be done unworthily — done, as he 
afterwards explains the words, with no discern- 
ment of the Lord's body, no perception of the 
difference between this and common bread, 
this and common wine — and no injury and no 
punishment follow ! He that eateth and drinketh 
(in this sense) unworthily, eateth and drinketh — 
not indeed, as our Version gives it, damnation, 
but still judgment— and God's judgment — to 
himself, as not discerning (distinguishing) the 
Lord's body. For this cause many are weak and 
sickly among you, and many sleep. These are 
examples of the judgment spoken of. For pro- 
faning thus the Lord's Supper, there had been 

6—2 



m THB REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE 

amongst them special visitations of the Divine 
displeasure, in divers tonus of weakness 
sickness, nay in Borne cases] even of premature 
death. And why, he asks, why these inflic- 
tions I For lack of a self-discipline which would 
have rendered needless the discipline of God. 
judged ourselves; if we (more exactly] 
discerned or discriminated ourselves — it is the 
very word used above for discerning the body; 
if we would but look into our own selves, ex- 
ercising there that power of discrimination be- 
tween right and wrong which God has given to 
all of us in conscience] if we would only sit in 
judgment ourselves within, entering, with a 
diligent introspection, into the Btate of heart 
and life, so that we might drag to the light of 
day our hidden obliquities, and with a resolute 
will cast them out of us andspare Dot ; then we 
should not thus be judged: taking into our own 
hands in this life the Judge's office, we should, 
with Bis gracious approval— -let us say it with 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 85 

reverence — take it out of His : He who doth 
not willingly afflict would see affliction to be 
needless, and suffer us to walk in the clear 
sunny day of a Father's reconciled countenance. 
If we would judge ourselves, we should not be 
judged. But when we are judged, we are chasten- 
ed of the Lord, that ive should not be condemned 
with the world, That judgment, which we might 
avert ; that judgment of God, which a severe 
self-judgment might altogether have prevented 
and set aside ; is yet, even when it falls, not a 
damnation: rather is it a chastening that we 
should not be condemned ; a fatherly discipline 
exercised betimes in this life, that we should 
still be owned in the great day, as among the 
washed and justified and sanctified; the bap- 
tismal cross not obliterated, the seal of the 
Spirit not erased. Pain and sickness, suffering 
and death itself, may be, in God's hand, a 
remedial discipline ; the careless inconsistent 
Christian may even be delivered unto Satan for 



Tin: REMEDIAL V18CIPL1NB 

(he destruction of the flesh, and yet all this may 
have in view an ulterior mercy j that the spirit 
/mi'/ be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. 

The subject is not more interesting than it 
i- instructive, 

i. For, first of all, what does it say to us 
as t<> God's concern in individual lives and 
destinies ? 

We sometimes speak, and more often feel, as 
though a life mentioned in Holy Scripture were 
made, by the very fact of that sacred contact — 
by its admission, I mean, in the manner of 
example or warning, to a place in the record of 
Inspiration — of a wholly different order and 
kind from a life such as men live now ; as though 
it must have had a value and an elevation and a 
grandeur more Worthy of Cod's notice and o£ 
God's interest than the doings or the sufferings, 
tic- fortunes or tie- destinies, <<i' a mere common- 
place being like OUT own. 1 know that the 

fallacy vanishes in the stating: we see that it 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 87 

is an illusion, and yet to-morrow we shall feel 
it still. I desire to fasten upon our minds, 
while we can, this obvious yet ill-learnt lesson ; 
the equality of all persons in God's regard : the 
absence, in His sight, of any such distinctions 
as those between great and small, sacred and 
common, Scripture characters and characters of 
common daily, English life : and to draw 
from it this inference, so simple in sound yet so 
deep in its penetration, that there is not one 
person at this moment present, in these seats 
and these galleries, in the management of 
whose life, as a matter of individual guidance 
and discipline, God Himself, the God of the 
spirits of all flesh, is not as directly, as imme- 
diately interested as ever He was in the spiri- 
tual affairs of these men and women at Corinth, 
upon whom, His own Word tells us, He sent 
weakness and sickness and even death, to 
punish their sins and to save their souls. Yes, 
my friends, there was nothing peculiar in 



88 THE REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE 

interest, and there was scarcely anything 
ceptional in treatment, in the cases of those 
Corinthians. These young lives, here making 
preparation for the work of time and for the 
solemn alternative <>t' eternity, are jus 

as, every one of them, in the regard of 
God, as though they had been brought into the 
Gospel covenant through the preaching of an 
Apostle, disciplined for heaven by a ministry 
of miracle, or placed on record in the Scripture 
page for the instruction and edification of latter 
days of the Church. I believe that the thought- 
ful amongst you, who mark the turnings of life 
and take heed to the signals of grace, could 

give — were the heart Opened, as it is Dot to 

man, in frank confession — an account of God's 
dealings with you personally, in the few years 

already gene by, BUCh as would satisfy VOU, if 

It convinced not others, of a hand guiding and 
guarding, a will purposing and ruling, yea a 
Spirit suggesting, striving, and influencing, as 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 89 

minutely as if you alone were its care, as really 
as if your ears could even hear the voice 
behind you, saying, This, this is the way : walk 
thou in it. 

Whoso is wise will ponder these things: and he 
shall understand the loving-kindness of the Lord. 

2. Again, I would beg you to notice the 
value here assigned to a position within the 
Church of Christ. 

These Corinthians were full of faults, and 
the hand of God was upon them in punishment. 
For their sins many were weak and sickly among 
them, and many slept. And yet, just because 
they were inside the Church, all this judgment 
was a chastening. Just because they were 
men who had listened to the Gospel call, and 
had come out from the mass of mankind to 
enter the Christian fellowship, and on the 
strength of that profession of faith had been 
subjected to the rite of initiation, and were now 
baptized men, partaking in Christian ordinances 



Tin: REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE 

and submitting themselves to Christian teach* 
they bad hope in their cud: what they 
1. they Buffered uot as punishment only, 
but distinctively as discipline: it' they even 
died under the rod of chastening, it was in tbc 
hope that they might not be condemned with 
the world- We need the thought, every one of 
us, not to make us careless, but to make ua 
thankful. There is a difference — a real and 
radical difference — between the inside and the 
outside of that Church which is Christ's body. 
If we even wish it, we cannot obliterate that 
mark. That which cometh into your minds — • 
God forbid that it should come there — sJiall not 
be at all, that ye say, We will be as the heathen : 
you cannot be as the heathen. Worse or 
better: better certainly in position — and what 
te that but Baying, partakers of a heavenly 
calling which will not Lei you alone; possessors 
of a hope, and heirs of a heaven, which God the 

Boly Chest will remind yOU of. and press upon 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 91 

you, and make a sting and goad to you if you 
will not have it for your joy and your crown ? 
such is your condition : Redemption is yours, 
because the world is redeemed : but Redemp- 
tion is yours beyond this, because you have 
been baptized, and because you were thereby 
brought into that right and that ownership and 
that use of the Divine relationship, which never 
again, save by open apostasy, can you be de- 
prived of while life is in your body. And 
because you are thus within the Christian 
fellowship, therefore all that befalls you has in 
it at least the possibility and the peradventure 
of salvation. That you be not condemned with 
the world is inscribed upon every disappoint- 
ment, every bereavement, every sorrow, every 
cross; inscribed upon pain and sickness, in- 
scribed upon desolation and death; till the 
day of grace be ended, and a God with whom 
there is no respect of persons must sit in 
judgment finally upon your soul. 



84 77//; UBMBDIAL DISCIPLINE 

- h ia the reality, of which there are 
many counterfeits, of a Christian Church mem- 
bership. It Lb Dot tii.it it entitles you, faithless 
or believing; to a Bhare of the inheritance of 

■ ' i£s in light : but it is, that it Bel 
within the school and home of God; gives you 
the right to every promise, and the possession of 
every influence for good ; places you within the 
sound of tin- inward teaching, and makes 
incident, joyful or adverse, of earthly existence, 
a positive intentional discipline of Divine love. 

He therefore that desplseth despiseth not 
man but God, who hath also given unto us His 
Holy Spirit 

3. Thirdly, and in particular, the text 
assigns a tender and merciful character to the 
graver and more penal exercises of the Divine 
government over human lives. Tain is one of 
God's ministers — death itself may be one of 
God's ministers — for the salvation of Hi^ 
( !hurch from the condemnation of the world. 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 93 

(i) That intermixture of loss and gain, of 
grief and joy, of injury and reparation, which 
pervades human life, has its exact counterpart 
in the Book of God. 

Fallen man had to gather his one hope out 
of the words of a curse. It shall bruise thy 
head was communicated for man's comfort in 
the same breath which said to the serpent, And 
thou shalt bruise his heel. And when that hope 
reached its fulfilment in the cross of Jesus 
Christ, then was it seen that the two things, 
the curse and the blessing, were to be com- 
pleted and consummated together : in the very 
wounding of man's heel was to be accomplished 
the crushing of the serpent's head, Even so has 
it been in all the minor fulfilments, before and 
since, of that comprehensive prophecy. In the 
suffering has lain the healing. Out of pain has 
sprung health, out of sorrow joy, and out of 
death life. Pain, sorrow, death, each in its turn 
has been God's minister to His Church for good. 



94 THE REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE 

We have Been this exemplified in a thou- 
sand ways. 

The indirect benefits of pain are many. 
re to pain the i f whole depart- 

ments of salutary ministration. The office of 
the Christian nurse, the office of the Christian 
physician, a Large pari of the office of the Chris- 
tian Clergyman, is the creation of pain. Such 
Institutions as that for.which I ask your help to- 
day — institutions in which a self-denying charity 
ministers day by day to suffering man — owe 
their e to pain. Every private home be- 

in its I urn a hospital : pain ent< i 
with it a oew influx of love, a aewefTorl ofself- 
I a new strength of unity. The 
Lord Jesus Chris! Eimself would have minis- 
tered upon earth in vain, if there had been no 
suffering hearts to claim His sympathy, and no 
<-il bodies to feel I [is power. 

We have called these the indirect benefits 

of pain, I: virtues in man, it called 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 95 

forth graces from the Saviour, which, but for it, 
must have lain dormant. 

Not less evident are the more direct uses of 
suffering; those of which the Apostle wrote, 
For this cause many are weak and sickly among 
you... chastened of the Lord, that they should 
not he condemned with the world. 

The first effect of pain is reality. Nothing 
so brings a man to himself. The vain man, the 
conceited man, the affected man, the incessant 
jester, the actor of a part, the wearer of a mask, 
the assumer of a character — let sharp pain 
come upon him — becomes natural instantly. 
You see him then — he sees himself then — as 
he is. The habit of years drops off from him in 
a moment : the touch of pain has stripped him 
bare, and he lies open, before God and man, in 
the secret strength or weakness of reality and 
truth. 

And the second effect of pain is humility. 
Not that poor feigned thing which men in 



THE RBMBDIAL DISCIPLINE 
health call humility : the general conf 

/ a m . W itli it- USlia] gloSS, wlnn it Ifl 

hard pressed, We are all sinners: not this: 
but thai humility which springs ou1 of a 
momentary glimpse of God; that humility 
which is impressed upon me by the giant grasp 
of one who is evidently stronger than I; by the 
conviction, wrung from me by suffering, that I 
can no more will away or charm away this 
consciousness of agony than 1 can say to the 
Sun, Stand thou still, or to the Ocean, Th 
slin.lt thou come, and no farther. The truth of my 
own helpli 3sm - is forced upon me at last ; 
and with it the reality of the Divine strength. 

And then, out of this, springs oftentimes, 
under God's influence, a third thing, which is 
called iii Holy Scripture a seeking and feeling 
after I rod. If 1 am absolutely at the mercy of 
One who is stronger than 1 — of One in com- 
parison with whom / am a worm and no man 
il that 1 should enquire, Who 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 97 

is He, and what ? Has He, who is thus strong 
over me, any will concerning me? Hoes it 
concern Him that I should be this, or this? 
that I should feel thus or thus towards Him ? 
that I should live this life, or that life 1 that 
I should desire and seek and do whether this 
or that 1 

And so, if the Word of God, or one rightly 
instructed in it, be at hand at this moment to 
guide, there will oftentimes arise out of pain 
(under grace) a fourth consequence : a hum- 
ble listening to the voice which speaks from 
heaven; a reverent attention to the call to 
penitence; a serious pondering of the past 
steps in evil; a bitter sorrow for that which 
has displeased God ; a thankful acceptance of 
the offer of mercy which is in Christ Jesus ; 
and a resolute setting out, afresh or for the first 
time, in the way of Gospel holiness and of the 
Divine life. 

These things have we seen : the history of 
V. S. 7 



THE RBMBDIAl DISCIPLINE 

the ministry is full of them : . 
tli. v are seen, they illustrate again the 
/ are veal: and sickly i 
■ that they should not he con- 
Id. 
3e things may arise in the common 
of God's Providence, when Buffering 
the careless, and the alacrity of p 
health anil spirits is exchanged, more i 
ually, for the couch of pining sickn< 
Or they may arise more exactly in the 
manner here indicated by St Paul ; when God 
is pleased to send some definite sickness as the 
. i of some definite sin, and to let pain 
follow upon transgression as its appropriate 
{n iialiy and retribution. 

And uo doubt, if our eyes were opened, like 
the eyes of the Prophet's servant in Dothan, to 
Bee the mountain of life full of those chariots 
and horses of fire which are the signals of God's 
active presence, we should perceive, oftener 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 99 

than now, some connection of cause and effect, 
certainly of provocation and retribution, in the 
distresses and diseases of our mortal being: 
we should know that, in deed and in truth, God 
is still living and moving in human life as the 
Judge and the Avenger; stopping one here, 
and one there, in the career of hidden ungodli- 
ness, and making Nature herself His execu- 
tioner in the appointment to each of some 
righteous recompense of punishment. We 
should perceive that, in our own case at least, 
God has not left us, even for a lifetime, to our- 
selves; but has interposed the arm of His 
chastisement — secretly to all but one person — 
because He saw us walking in some way that 
was not good, and because nevertheless He 
loved us, and would do us good at our latter 
end, 

(2) But there stands behind, a word yet 
more remarkable, which tells us that, for the 
same cause, and with the same purpose of 

7—2 



Till: KBMBDIAL DISCIPLINE 

mercy, many even sleep, In Bhort, not pain 
only, but death itself, may be a minisfr r of I rod 
od. 

I know nothing, in the whole compass of 
lire, at once mure marvellous and more 
reconciling than this. 

We read, I think, the Old Testament re- 
cords of judgment, with a sort of tacit pre- 
conception that, when God slew, He also con- 
demned. Many have been the half-suppi 
feelings of inward dissatisfaction, with which 
men have studied the fate, for example, of the 
Disobedient Prophet. Nature said within them, 
that the Bin of the deceived man, who believed 
his brother-prophet's lying utterance, when he 
ought to have clung tenaciously to God's earlier 
and unrevoked charge to himself, was less, after 
all, than the Bin of the deceiver, who destroyed 
him by his lie, and then wenl to cry over him, 
Alas, my brother J And yet the one is ruth- 
lessly seized by the executioner of vengeance, 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 101 

and the other lives out all his clays, and goes, 
respected and honoured, to the sepulchre of his 
fathers. Cast back, Christian friends, upon all 
such records the light of the revelation before 
us. If this man was what we make him — 
faithful in the main tenor, deceived in the 
special instance — be sure that the Judge of all 
the earth certainly did right, and remember 
St Paul's saying, Many are weak and sickly 
among you — yea, many even sleep — chastened 
of the Lord, that they should not be condemned. 

And many have been the illustrations of 
the same saying, afforded to us both in the 
history of nations and in the records of personal 
experience. When we are tempted to ask, Why 
should the sins of a whole dynasty of wicked 
French Kings be visited with unexampled 
severity on the last and best? might we not 
let in the light of eternity upon the dark and 
piteous scene, and answer, Peradventure because 
God iv as pleased thus to correct a frivolity and 



THE RBMBDIAl isi: 

which imperilled the so 
gave the >■ and the body to the 

by St Paul, that the spirit might be saved in 
he Lord Jesus i 
Who can doubt that the same disci] 
but gracious, has been exercised on a less 
august stage in a thousand times ten thousand 
instances? How often lias the confession been 
heard on a penitent's deathbed, I desire not pro- 
longed life: I feel myself weak to resist tempta- 
tion: Iliad ratlin; if it please God, he taken 
away now from ceil to come ! And how often lias 
that prayer been answered ! How often has the 
trembling cry for mercy, the evident sign and 
token of repentance, the earnest trust in Jesus, 
and the Longing desire for the hea^ enly presence, 
been all that was vouchsafed in evidence of the 
reality of a conversion! It has pleased God, in 
bender compassion, thai the Bincere resolution 
Bhould never be put to the proof; that the 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 103 

dying sorrow for sin, and the dying trust in the 
Saviour, should be left as the only testimony to 
the sinner's earnestness of repentance ! And 
shall we coldly look on, in such a case, and say, 
I have no faith in deathbed conversions : I have 
no proof that, if that dying man had lived, he 
might not have returned to his sin and died 
therein 1 No — but have you no faith, yourself, 
in the wisdom and lovingkindness of your God ? 
no confidence that He, who doeth all things 
well, judged better herein than you, and per- 
haps was thus fulfilling the very word written 
here in my text, For this cause many sleep.., 
that they should not be condemned with the 
world 1 

My friends, God is better to us than we, 
and His mercy ampler than our puny measure- 
ments can compass. • I believe, if it were only 
on the strength of this record, that there is a 
remedial agency in sickness, a remedial efficacy 
(under God) oftentimes in death, which largely 



104 THE REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE 

nts the Dumber of the heirs of salvation, 

and replenishes the great multitude which no 

■ m number with recruits of whom earth 

- not, and whose names only the opening 

of the book of life shall reveal. To these, how 
many Boever they be, shall belong the mys- 
terious joy of those words of the Apostle Peter, 
That they might be judged according to men in 
the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit. 

4. The lessons of the text are yet far from 
exhausted: and one at least must be added, 
upon the instrumentality here ascribed to the 
body, in furthering the purposes of God's mercy 
concerning the soul. 

The experience of most of those who hear 
in. bears hard, 1 doubt aot> on the body. They 
have found it the constant drag upon duty, 
and the perpetual inlel of temptation. No 
.-in can bo committed save through the body: 
more than this, almost every sin is qoI only 
acted but conceived through Borne suggestion 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 105 

of the organs of sense. Therefore it is no 
wonder if their estimate of the body is both 
low and unfriendly. The Christian man owes 
the body a grudge for what he is. Some 
Christian men have deliberately set themselves 
to weaken it by austerities. They have thought 
their spiritual well-being to be exactly pro- 
portional to the humiliation and attenuation 
of the body. "We cannot wonder, we can scarce- 
ly blame : and yet we think that Holy Scrip- 
ture teaches us a better discipline and a more 
excellent way. 

(i) For first of all it reminds us of the 
glorious prospect opened before us, in which 
the body, revived and reconstructed, shall be 
an essential part of the redeemed and rescued 
man. Instead of bidding us look forward 
to the unclothing, it bids us direct all our 
anticipations to the wondrous reinvestiture and 
clothing upon. The hope of Israel is, not death, 
but resurrection. The soul disembodied may 



THE REMEDIAL UNB 

and recruit itself from the toils and 
wounds of its earthly travail an ; may 

. in the water of life, and bask awhile, 

and revival, in the sunshine of 

smile. But th mbodied — 

if we rightly read the inspired sayings— cannot 

• work for God : capable of 

contemplation, capable of praise, cap:;' 

adoration, it is incapable still of ministration : 

not till the spiritual body, incorruptible and 

glorious, is added to the soul in B a, can 

that work begin — be it what it may — in which 

eternity is to be spent ; that work in which 

man, complete in both his parts, shall emulate 

the angelic activity; like the Angels, excelling 

in strength ; doing (not as now) Gods eom- 

mandment, hearkening (as never before) to the 

tfs words. 

re this body, which has in it 

the seed and germ of Such an immortality, 
must be looked upon with reverence and 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. — 10.7 

treated with honour. Know ye not, St Paul 
asks, that your body is already, is now, the 
temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you?... 
Wherefore glorify God in your body. Let every 
man know how to possess his vessel now in 
sanctification and honour. The future resurrec- 
tion casts its shadow before, asserts for the 
body of humiliation some share of that respect 
which belongs of right to the body of glory. 

This is one half of the revelation of God 
concerning man's body. 

(2) The other half of that revelation is 
here. This body, this inlet and medium, too 
often, of temptation, is also in God's hand the 
instrument of a fatherly discipline. That dis- 
cipline, as far as it is penal, is God's, not yours. 
You are to keep your body in temperance, 
sometimes even by the help of special acts of 
a necessary and religious self-denial, that it 
may do the soul's work, and prove itself the 
Spirit's temple. This you must do : but you 



THE REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE 

arc nb< bo undertake God's office, or presume 
to punish yourself through the body. Leave 
that work, bo far as it shall be needful, to God 
alone. Be, if and as He sees it to be needful 
for you, will chasten and discipline you through 
the machinery of the body. If pain comes, 
God's hand in it. Connect it, if there be 
cause tn do so, with some definite sin : even 
then accept it with a thankful sorrow. If there 
be no such cause revealed to you by a diligent 
self-scrutiny, then connect pain with general 
sinfulness; with the inheritance of a fallen 
nature, too surely acting itself, day by day, in 
thoughts and words and deeds of at least an 
unwilling infirmity. Accept it in this form 
with humility and thankfulness: feel that you 
deserve it. feel that you need it, see its 
gracious object, pray that it may bring yen 
to the desired end. And even so, when 
death is in Bight, think then of the words, 
Many even sleep—judged and chastened that 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 109 

they be not condemned: into God's hand com- 
mend your expiring soul, and, if He hide Him- 
self with the cloud, call Him, even as Christ 
did, your Father still. 

5. My friends — and more especially I 
would speak now to my younger brethren — it 
maybe that the subject which has engaged our 
latest thoughts has appeared to some of you 
wanting in appropriateness and application. You 
are here, not in pain, not in sickness, with no 
sign or token of approaching death : why speak 
to you of these solemn matters, which seem at 
present to be so far removed from your thoughts 
and vision ? I will tell you why I speak of them. 
Not though, but because, they are so far removed 
from your thoughts and vision. I would have 
them press upon you in all their strangeness ; 
in the fulness of their contrast and contrariety 
to the life which is yours now. I can conceive 
few things more salutary to a young man — 
conscious of that vitality of every power and 



ll" Tin: RBMEDJAL DISCIPLINE 

every faculty, which makes existence ito 

—than thai he should bring before him- 
self, from time to time, by a determined ei 
tli"-'' stern realities of our human being of 
which we have now spoken: God's discipline of 
pain and sickness, God's discipline of a Buffering 
death. Let him enter, on one of these daj 

Jth and cheerfulness— while life smiles upon 
him, and Nature herself .seems to sympathize 
with his gladness— the walls of that Hospital 
to which we are to give to-day; and which 
stands, as it were, by the highway of our 
i veryday life, to remind us of a condition 
most opposite to our own, and to which nev< r- 
theless the very accident of an accident migh* 
at any moment reduce us. Let him stand 
toere, for a few moments, the thoughtful ob- 
server of tli,- scene which presents itself. ]i;, 
pity will be stirred in hi,,, bythesighl of every 
form and kind ,,f suffering: little children, 
dinging to a mother's bosom, as if enquiring of 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. Ill 

her what ails them and why : strong men, 
brought down in a moment from a life of pro- 
ductive industry to the helplessness of accident 
or the wandering of fever : young wives, wait- 
ing their turn for admission into the chamber 
of sickness, or listening with agonized eagerness 
for that physician's judgment which they must 
receive as the loved one's doom. It is good for 
him, assuredly, to be there. He will return 
from that visit a wiser if perhaps a sadder 
man. He will raise his heart to God in thank- 
fulness for an undeserved exemption thus far 
from the stroke of pain. He will ask himse]f 
how the touch of sickness — sharp and sudden, 
or else gradual wasting sickness— would find 
ror affect Mm. Is his heart so disciplined 
already beneath the will of God, by a daily 
continuance in prayer and well-doing, that he 
would hear with submission, hear without 
terror, the summons to a bed of sickness or an 
early grave? And thus he will have obeyed, 



THE REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE 
in part, the profitable binl of the Apostle, If 

. should not be 

Christian friends, it is impossible for one 
advanced far beyond you in life's long journey, 
^template without emotion his younger 
and less experii need comrades. He must know 
— if his life has not been screened from anxiety 
1)> tyond the common lot of all men — how Blippery 
is the surest standing, how fallacious may be 
the brightest promi.se, in one who is now pre- 
paring to set out for himself in that career the 
end of which must be life eternal or eternal 
death. II<' must think of the solemn words, 
TJie last shall be first, and the first last: for 
many are called, but few arc chosen. And he 

knOWS, if he be a Christian man, one and but 
one safeguard; open to all, infallible for all, 
yet alas! certain to be refused by many ; that 
which lies, half shown, half hidden, in the 

words of the text, /five would judge ourselves, 



OF DISEASE AND DEATH. 113 

we should not be judged. Yes, a heart opened 
daily with diligent thoughtfulness before the 
throne of grace — a life daily watched and 
tended by the sought and promised influence 
of the Holy Spirit of God — this, this is 
a security, the one security, alike against 
God's judgment here and God's condemna- 
tion hereafter: for this life is lived under 
God's protection, this heart is fulfilled with the 
heavenly benediction. 

Day by day, let us carry our thoughts 
onward into the remote future, and forecast 
the one question and the one answer which 
will alone interest then. When all of life is 
gathered up for us within the curtains of a 
death-bed, the one only question of moment 
will be, In whom have I believed ? and the one 
only answer of peace will be, Thanks be to God, 
who giveth me the victory through our Lord 
Jesus Christ. Gifts of mind and body ; stores 
of knowledge and wisdom ; powers once exer- 
V.S. 8 



114 THE REMEDIAL DISCIPLINE 

cised for b< »r even for the 

'jni.d of man; Btirring incidents of political 
mforts of domestic love ; all will 
then i I back, for us, to the earth from 

which they were taken. One thing, one only, 
will survive the wreck of all : a BOul red' 
and ransomed by the blo< •< 1 of Christ, a bouI 
indwelt and quickened by the Eternal Spirit 
God in His mercy grant us this: and then, 
.nine ease or pain, come gladness or sorrow, 
mine success or disappointment, come lift- <>r 
death, all shall be well: for we arc Christ's, 
and ( 'hrist in Gods. 



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